So I’m finally catching up on “The Sopranos.” (Yeah, I’m late to the game.) In the first season, Tony talks to Dr. Melfi about a dream he had where a duck flies off with his penis. I just watched “Employee of the Month” where after being raped, Dr. Melfi has a bizarre dream where she walks into a room with a soda machine. She puts two pieces of dry rotini into the change slot. Nothing comes down. So she sticks her arm up into the soda machine, it gets stuck, and in walks the rapist. He begins to attack her and one piece of pasta falls down where the soda can should be. Introduce a rotweiler, who attacks the rapist. She later discusses the dream’s significance with her psychotherapist.
As I was watching this, I was struck by the fact that my dreams are never surreal like that. I mean, they’re surreal in the sense that I meet up with people who have died and places that are familiar don’t look the same in my dreams as they do in real life, but they’re never surreal in the sense that I put pasta into a quarter slot. Or hear “Wizard of Oz” music playing repetively in the background. Or listen to fish on ice confessing their betrayals.
So is David Chase simply exercising his active imagination or do other people really have these strange, surreal dreams (aside from hallucinogenic drugs)?
I once had a dream where I was standing in the middle of a parched landscape with cracked dry mud for miles in every direction, watching myself being climbed by what I understood to be aborted fetuses. They were cheap pink plastic baby dolls (not the realistic ones, the ones with no hair and almost no paint) wrapped in cellophane (their dessicated amniotic sacs) with dry twigs standing in for their dead umbilical cords.
I don’t usually remember dreams but that one stuck in my mind. Most of my dreams are at least vaguely disturbing and they’re always somewhat surreal, unless a person or pet close to me just died and I get a dream featuring them for one final goodbye.
The Sopranos’ dream sequences rarely feel like my actual dreams. The only exception is the long dream sequence in “Funhouse”, the 2nd Season finale – especially the talking fish, and the scene where Furio handed Tony a roll of toilet paper before driving away in a Smart Car…now that’s what my surreal dreams are often like.
Two weeks ago I dreamt that I had four-dimensional sex.
Last Friday I dreamt that I was at my friend’s house. I woke up. I was still at my friend’s house. I woke up again. I was still at my friend’s house, only this time I was in bed in the computer room eating Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, only the noodles were slices of those mini-jelly-roll things, covered by the sauce. It tasted normal, though. Then I woke up again, and I was in my own bed.
Last night I was actually at this friend’s house, and I had this amazing dream about going up the CN Tower, and being outside on the observation deck above a dense cloud layer, and sitting next to the edge and feeling the wind. The top of the clouds were frozen into ice chunks, and as the clouds flowed past the Tower, I could hear the ice grinding on the concrete where the clouds first hit the Tower, and piling up in front.
Yes, mine are usually surreal. The one I remember most is where I was being tickled by a huge floating granny in the sky. She stopped and I fell a long way through the sky, through the earth, and into a hellish clown factory. It wasn’t as scary as it sounds, but it sure was weird.
I’ve dreamed new episodes from my favourite tv shows (with or without me in them) - and they were GOOD!
Yeah, I have very vivid and/or surreal dreams all the time. I’m a fairly lucid dreamer, too, and have extremely creative, very fun dreams (like the time I was sitting and cracking jokes with Hugh Laurie). Dreaming rules.
Only four dimensions? Only SpaceTime? Amateur…I’ve had M-Theory Sex.
My dreams tried to kill me once. I was having a lucid dream where I was flying around mountains and valleys and beautiful canyons, and eventually I wound up in this place of Perfect Order, a balanced grid of interstate highways and freeway signs. It was the most Perfect, Timeless place I’d ever visited while lucid dreaming.
Then a voice spoke to me: “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here! This place is off-limits!”
I said: “But I like this place! Why can’t I stay here?”
The voice replied: “In that case…why don’t you JOIN US…”
Suddenly, I felt a violent tug on my soul. The vision ripped away, and I woke up – and even as I woke up, I felt another violent tug on my mind. It wasn’t until I physically stood up out of bed that it stopped.
And that’s how I learned certain parts of my Dreamworld were forbidden to humankind. (Recently, I dreamed of mounting an army which invaded, conquered and pillaged that world, so it’s all good now.)
I suspect I must have the dullest dreams in the world. Often I’ll have dreams in which I pretty much just go through with my daily routine. Then after I’ve woken up that day, I’ll think something to myself like “I have to be at that appointment at 7. Wait a second, what appointment? Oh, huh, that doesn’t really make much sense. I guess that was a dream.”
Then again, I have had several dreams with multiple false awakenings. One time as an undergraduate I was taking a nap in the department library as a break from studying for a test. I dreamt that I woke up and resumed studying. Then I realized I was still asleep, so I thought to myself “okay, time to wake up.” And so I did and resumed studying. Then I realized I was still asleep. This process repeated for something like six or seven times until I finally woke up. For the next hour, I kept double checking to make sure I was actually awake. I’ve had other similar dreams, but that was the most vivid and had the most false awakenings. I suppose that qualifies as surreal.
Last night I dreamed that the crew of the Firefly stole Parliment wigs from a Renn fair and used them to disguise themselves so Cylons wouldn’t recognize them. Is that surreal enough?
Seriously though, my dreams tend to be an odd mixture of all the crap that goes into my brain combined with whatever I’m currently neurotic about. So things will be surreal compared to real life, but they won’t be surreal in a truly random way. My dreams probably wouldn’t be as original in it’s bizarreness as Naked Lunch, at least not if I had never seen Naked Lunch.
I have surreal dreams whenever I get more than six hours’ sleep. (As I understand it, the first few hours’ dreams have to do with problem-solving. Anything after that is pure imagination.) It’s been a long week, but I have tomorrow off, so I get to sleep in – whoopee! I look forward to surreal dreams!
1st dream. I grew up on a house boat in Marina Del Ray, CA. I was dreaming that I was walking down the dock. I approached a white refrigerator. Inside were a bunch of fish organized like a vending machine. I was talking to the fish but I don’t recall the conversation.
2nd dream. I used to go to a park not far from the boat. It was for young kids. I was dreaming I went to the park and was on the merry-go-round. One of the smaller ones that spins super fast. There were a bunch of kids spinning it. It finally got so fast I could no longer hold on to the middle and was finally hanging on for dear life with my legs straight out. I couldn’t hold on anymore and let go. I flew over the entire marina and before I landed on Fisherman’s Wharf I woke up.
More recently.
The other night I was dreaming that me and a team were killing off zombies underground somewhere in the middle east. Felt like I was in a video game.
Just had one today. I dreamed that I was a magician performing tricks in front of an audience with paperclips but secretly know that another performer is Ad Advis, evil wizard!
Right after his act (I think) he puts his plot into action and I chased him down a tower which consists of slopes instead of staircase. Finally I cornered him when a stupid aide of his pushed a lever which lower down a gigantic boulder, blocking the entrance. “You are trapped with me forever!” he gloated. Never mind, I can…
The most surreal dream I ever had was this fever dream, in which I dreamed about infinity.
I didn’t actually see or hear anything, it was just the feeling of… something being huge, and very rapidly increasing. Space maybe. It kept multiplying itself, so the growing was going faster, faster and faster, until I percieved it to be infinity. Or eternity. It was the worst dream ever.
